Mazzaropi

This documentary explores a quite multi-layered portrait of popular Brazilian movie comedian Amácio Mazzaropi, through testimonies of people who worked with him, both admirer and critical ones (also showing footage of his films). I was afraid that it could be a laudatory piece, but fortunately it is a quite balanced documentary and did not hide his dark side. The most interesting and revealing testimonies were the ones by Selma Egrei and David Cardoso, while the only really bad and useless one was predictably that of Carlos Massa "Ratinho". Various sides have been explored, such as the kind of cinema he made (the technical problems, the public success, the critics and the prejudices against him, the prejudices inside his films, the social concerns in the stories, his filmmaker career stages, the formula repeated over and over), the strategies he adopted as businessman (from distribution and production to unfair contracts) and the kind of relationship he had with actors and crew (often distant and not pleasant, paying little but timely, with ambiguous and surprisingly disgusting way of giving opportunities to artists in the beginning of their career). I think some parts of the documentary do not really contribute and I would have made minor changes in the final cut, but the documentary is nice, informative and worth being watched.